Conservatives Rally to Defend Portman on SCOTUS Stand

Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesKEN KLUKOWSKI3 Mar 2016Washington, DC

Liberals will target Senator Rob Portman, Republican from Ohio, and pressure him to confirm President Obama’s forthcoming Supreme Court nomination. But prominent conservatives are rallying to defend Portman and the Court.

Obama is seeking to decisively change the orientation of the Supreme Court following the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia. As Breitbart News has already reported, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has made clear that his committee will not hold hearings on a vote on the nomination, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that the Senate will not take final action on the nomination.

Both senators say that the American people need to decide this issue, and announce their decision through their votes in November.

Ohio’s junior senator is up for reelection this year. Liberals would like to peel off Republican senators in 2016 to force Grassley and McConnell to change course. Knowing the odds are slim of achieving that outcome, they also seek to damage and ultimately defeat Republican senators, to take control of the Senate and then immediately confirm Obama’s nomination.

The new Congress will be sworn in on January 3, and the new president on January 20. Even if they lose the White House, Democrats seek to create a 17-day window in which they could ram through a liberal nominee, abolishing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in the process, to install a liberal justice in to a lifetime appointment that could last decades.

Ken Blackwell is the longest-service conservative leader in Ohio, and a national conservative superstar. A former mayor Cincinnati, Ohio treasurer, Ohio secretary of state, U.S. undersecretary in a cabinet department, and U.S. ambassador, Blackwell currently serves in the leadership of a host of conservative organizations, including the National Rifle Association, Club for Growth, Family Research Council, Liberty University, Conservative Action Project, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and the American Civil Rights Union.

Blackwell is rallying conservative support for Portman, telling Breitbart News in an exclusive:

On many issues, from gun rights, to religious liberty, to life issues, Rob Portman has never flinched from the conservative cause.

While the senator and I differed on the substance of the marriage debate, we agreed that the Supreme Court should not have made that decision, and state legislators should. He never flinched from that, either.

Rob’s record on federal judges has been excellent. A graduate of a top law school, he served a quarter-century ago in the White House counsel’s office under Ambassador Boyden Gray, who is a giant among constitutional conservatives.

Since then, he has consistently shown his commitment to supporting textualists and originalists to the Supreme Court, who will adhere to the words of the Constitution and laws that the American people adopted. When changes should be made, those changes can only be made by the American people, not by judges who think that they have some enlightenment to rewrite the law whenever they don’t like what it says.

We are not going to let the wrongheaded notions of the Left prevail. Rob Portman’s continuing to hold this Senate seat is essential to ensuring that President Obama does not get another radical-left liberal justice on the Supreme Court who will finally carry out Obama’s agenda to fundamentally transform the United States. Ohioans must show their full support for Senator Portman.

Ken Klukowski is legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.